Back on the front porch

So, here we are back on the front porch of the old farm house at Winedale, for the first time in several weeks. Been in Houston getting a new hip joint for my partner. She has had a ton of discomfort but is gradually mending. I’d say her main problem now is sleeping. One of the things they don’t tell you about these fancy joint-replacement surgeries is that you’ll probably have a hell of a time getting enough rest after you’re sprung from the hospital.

Rosie the Lab pup, who is now just about grown, spent more than a month at college, while we were hospitalizing. She’s been trained to give up all the bad habits she learned during the first year of her life. Like greeting strangers by placing two muddy forefeet on their shirt fronts. Chewing on antique furniture. Barking at fierce monsters that don’t exist. Stuff like that. We’ll see how long it takes her to forget what she’s learned.

Things are greening and growing here at Winedale. We’ve even got a few patches of bluebonnets on the place, and I found 3 inches of muddy water in my rain gauge. Haven’t yet walked down to see if the tank caught any water. But I’m hopeful our big live oaks will survive. Some of them looked really unhappy early this year. Of course just now they’re in their least attractive stage — shedding foliage and trying to produce buds and blooms and new leaves.

Do you have trees? How are they looking? Sometimes I have bad dreams in which all our trees have died and this place looks like nine miles west of Odessa..

25 Responses

Got one of them new fangled hips on my left side almost 7 years ago. Went back to work took about 5 falls,always got up. Retired now just putter around keeping this old shack standing. Hip pain is always with me sometimes my leg don’t go where I want it to go. Dr, said everything looks good just takes time. I have heard many stories from friends that say they have no trouble or issues. I hope your partner is one of those success stories. My hip does work better and makes less noise than the one I had for 60 years, but I still don’t like it. Make sure shes does her therapy and exercise.

A farm dog should be allowed some bad habits. Baying at the moon at the very least. Now chasing livestock is something you can’t tolerate, but too few bad habits they lose their personality. Like our first amendment rights, dogs should have the right to freedom of expression.

I’m beginning to think I’ve lost my big old pecan tree. It hasn’t produced in several years and is showing no signs of life. The oaks look good and thankfully I have no pines.

May your brides healing be fast and as pain free as possible. My sister-in-law went thru the hip replacement bit a year or so ago, and is glad she did. She now moves with the grace she did a decade and a half ago.

Good to have you back in your country haunts. Hope that your wife is beginning to experience the benefit of the pain she has endured.
One beef. You will have seen that several of us have had our entries disappear, which is both irritating and off-putting. Is it possible to track down why and have it corrected please?

Spring is rather late here in SE Nacogdoches county. The sweetgums and hackberrys are leafing out nicely, but the oaks don’t show any signs yet that I can tell. The redbud and dogwood have leaves now, but the flowers have been far and few between. We had storms roll through late Thursday and Friday that dumped 1.65″ of rain, so that helped. The pears all had bumper crops of blooms just prior to the ice storm, but whether they got pollinated and set fruit has yet to be determined. Not many bees or wasps nor have I seen the usual crop of butterflies yet. I keep my fingers crossed that things will do well.

Looks like a pretty fair wildflower season shaping up in Washington and Fayette counties, around Brenham and La Grange. Getting a lot of that dang bastard cabbage, though. The yellow blooms are pretty but the wildflower gurus say that stuff is a real threat to our annual spring display along the roadsides.

I’m in northeast Polk County and my two tanks are full but not overflowing. My live oaks are fine but then you have to get pretty bad to kill a live oak. Mine must be close to seventy years old and they’ve seen a lot of drought, I don’t doubt.

Do I have trees? In my small yard I have two huge live oaks, a medium sized one, and three pecan trees. This is not a home for folks that don’t like yard work.

I also have 10-15 squirrels. The other morning I walked out the front door and could hear many squirrels barking. I looked up and saw a large raptor flying away with a squirrel hanging from it’s talons. I’d like to see more of that. We have far too many bushy tailed rodents.

Maybe you’ve read about the 5.1 earthquake here on the leftist coast on Friday. Well, I live about 2 miles from the epicenter and it nearly bounced me out of the chair. Bookcases, chest of drawers, etc. sold in California come with straps that you attach to the wall to keep them from falling over during quakes. Sure wish I had installed mine.

So glad Babette has the surgery behind her now… But I’ve heard the rehab after knee, hip, and shoulder surgery is really difficult and very painful. Tell her to hang in there…and I will remember her (and you) in my prayers!…Yes, we over here in the Carmine area are seeing lots of greening up especially since the rain this past week… My husband actually had to mow yesterday! Like you, we’ll see about the trees (which ones do not bud out with spring here). My husband has done so much tree hauling (to the burn pile)with the past droughts’ damage… and like you, I sometimes wonder if this area will be like the Sahara Desert someday. I hope not!! God’s blessings to you and Babette!!

Well, if not nine miles west at least the town of Notrees.
I’m here by the whoopers and my woods look bad. Around 5 years ago a borer struck the sweetbay trees so they all died. Then with the drought a borer got to the yaupons. We are a tinderbox. The live oaks look miserable, I was hoping for a really good soaking before they started with the flowers and the new leaves but it looks like it isn’t going to happen. They are surviving but they are stressed; very, very stressed.

Rehab is no fun, but it does work (eventually). Keep after it Mrs. Babette.

Rosie will probably be so glad to get out of “school” she will do her best to obey faithfully.

Trees – too early to tell much in the Panhandle, but my small live oak doesn’t look good to me. I let it become heavily infested with live oak scale before I recognized it last year. Looks pretty bad right now, but hopefully a heavy spraying of malathion last fall (when I realized what was going on) and neem oil treatment this early spring will right the course. All other trees look to be weathering the drought pretty well. Times will tell.

Praying that heavy rains in the midst of a warm spring will make the Mrs. feel better soon.

I lost a large number of pin oaks due to the drought 2 years ago. That drought also killed many of our May haws and some large yaupons. I lost a number of post oaks to post oak blight. Two were huge, the 2 largest post oaks I’ve ever seem. This pertains to the place in Washington county where I have the bird feeders. I expect to lose a few more due to the post oak blight & from being weakened by that drought. Still, overall I have a large wooded area that is in good shape. My trees in town are in good shape but the mulberry was wind damaged a few months ago. We have received a lot of rain. Enough that it takes a week or more to be absorbed (in the meadow).

My live oaks are starting to drop leaves and bud out. I’ve got about a dozen live oaks in big pots that started from the big acorn crop last year. They came up in the beds under the tree in the yard, so I transplanted them in the fall and they are going great guns now. I’m going to eventually plant them out on my property so someday after I’m gone and they’re spreading their arms over the place it will be something to remember me by: that I left the place a little nicer than it was.

I like that. I’ve got a few trees growing pretty tall now that I planted 30 years ago, or more. It pleases me that one of these days, decades from now, people will sit in the shade of those trees and know that I planted them. That’s sort like a stone with my name on it in a graveyard. Maybe better. — I planted a couple of trees in the wrong place and now they’re in the way of progress. But that’s the way she goes. You’re remembered not only for the good you do, but for your mistakes, as well.

Husband was working unhappily in London 40 years ago. On week ends he would motor up to the Yorkshire farm he’d bought with his savings after retirement, to stake and weed the 25 acres of mixed conifer broadleaf woodland he’s planted on the side of Burn Fell which was otherwise heather and gorse upland moor. Today it is full of wildlife (fortunately no grey squirrels) and cover for all sorts of birds, and edible mushrooms flourish there in the fall; even though in 1974 the gumment changed the county boundaries and put farm and woodland in Lancashire. The locals still froth at the mouth about that. . . Planting that now-mature woodland is one of the two things in life which has given him most personal satisfaction. (The other was founding an engineering school in El Salvador.)

Many of us would enjoy reading these if they were printed in the paper along with “the best from Leon”(selected stories taken from his previously published articles). A big hole is in the paper where his column appeared.